This article by Dennis Prager has been making the rounds on some podcasts I listen to, by which I mean people have been using it to underscore the absurdity of some of Brett Kavanaugh's defenders. I wasn't going to read it, because I've read and heard stuff by Prager before (he used to come on The Adam Carolla Show from time to time), and it's almost always truly awful -- a trifecta of bad ideas, poorly argued, underscored by hubris -- but I finally caved, and unsurprisingly it really is as bad as advertised. I decided to do that thing where I copy the article in full and then ridicule it, because some things need to be ridiculed, and this article is one of them. After the dashes everything in plain print is Prager's article and my comments are in bold.
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The Charges against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored
It is almost impossible to overstate the damage done to America’s moral compass by taking the charges leveled against Judge Brett Kavanaugh seriously.
It undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society.
Taking charges of sexual assault seriously undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society? I would say committing acts of sexual misconduct does more to undermine such principles, but so far at least we are very much on brand for a conservative like Prager -- being an accuser is often considered worse than doing the misdeeds one is accused of.
Those who claim that the charges against Judge Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford are important and worth investigating and that they ultimately, if believed, invalidate his candidacy for the U.S. Supreme Court are stating that:
Before he gets to his points, notice he's already packaging two separate issues together: 1) Whether or not the charges against Kavanaugh are worthy of investigation; 2) Whether or not they are invalidating if believed. It's a perfectly consistent position to say they should be investigated, and then ultimately decide they are not invalidating. In fact, the very purpose of an investigation would be to determine this.
a) What a middle-age adult did in high school is all we need to need to know to evaluate an individual’s character — even when his entire adult life has been impeccable.
Literally nobody is saying this.
b) No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager.
See above.
No decent — or rational — society has ever believed such nihilistic nonsense.
Yes, and neither does anybody else except Prager's straw man. My last post expressly addresses the quandary of handling accusations against adults from their teenage years, and if you want to hear somebody more professional and more prominent than me talk about it, listen to Slate's episodes of Political Gabfest on Kavanaugh. Emily Bazelon, certainly no fan of Kavanaugh's jurisprudence, states explicitly how uncomfortable she is with holding adults accountable for things they did as children.
This is another example of the moral chaos sown by secularism and the Left. In any society rooted in Judeo-Christian values, it is understood that people should be morally assessed based on how they behave over the course of their lifetime — early behavior being the least important period in making such an assessment.
If you want to get into a debate about Judeo-Christian values versus secularism when it comes to sex, I'm all for it. Because I can't think of anything that has a worse track record on anything else in the history of humankind than religion does on sex.
These religious values taught us that all of us are sinners and, therefore, with the exception of those who have engaged in true evil, we need to be very careful in making moral evaluations of human beings.
"True evil" is such a catch-all cop-out (what is it? and who gets to decide?), but okay I agree with the larger point about being careful in making moral evaluations.
And, of course, we were taught to extend forgiveness when people demonstrate through their actions that they have changed. As a well-known ancient Jewish adage put it: “Where the penitent stands, the most righteous cannot stand.” In other words, the highest moral achievement is moral improvement.
This is subtly one of the weakest arguments Prager proffers (and that's saying something), because, although I'm not religious, I know that key pieces of many religions, including Judaism and Christianity, are atonement and repentance. Kavanaugh has neither atoned nor repented for his "sins." On the contrary, he's categorical denied them, in effect saying his accuser is either lying or mistaken (as if it's impossible that the guy who used to drink to excess and has already shown his "flexibility" when it comes to truth and who doesn't want an investigation by a neutral party could be the mistaken/dishonest one).
As I mentioned in my previous post, if Kavanaugh had responded differently to the charges -- if he had said that he doesn't remember everything he did as a drunk, dumb kid, and that he was sorry if he caused any pain, then things would be very different, but he didn't say that. He makes no acknowledgement of any mistakes on his part at all. Until he does (which he won't), getting into all this "where the penitent stand" stuff seems moot to me.
Perhaps the most important principle violated by taking this 36-year-old high school-era charge seriously is the principle of the moral bank account.
Every one of us has a moral bank account. Our good deeds are deposits, and our bad deeds are withdrawals. We therefore assess a person the same way we assess our bank account. If our good actions outweigh our bad actions, we are morally in the black; if our bad actions greatly outweigh our good actions, we are morally in the red.
This is not how society works. This is not how morality works. We don't allow people to commit crimes and behave immorally because they have enough credit in their moral bank accounts to make up for it. (It's like a riff on that Simpsons clip: I'd like to remind the court how many good things I've done in my life. I should be able to run over as many kids as I want!) This is such a simplistic way to view morality, and more problematically, it's a total useless and impractical one, because there is nobody qualified to evaluate our moral currency and run our accounts. There are no moral bankers. How much does a grope cost? How much does a lewd comment cost? How much credit do you get for not harassing somebody? And what do you get for doing something good for one person that's simultaneously bad for somebody else?
But this is how Prager thinks. I've heard him talk about why he's religious, and one of his reasons is that without God there is no "objective" moral truth. He's very bothered by the relativism of human morality. And, by the way, so am I! It's scary and weird to think that there is nothing out there to keep us in line -- that there is no ultimate justice -- that we are all we have. But my answer isn't to make a bunch of shit up and pretend as if there is. And even if Prager is right about a real God holding an objective moral truth, it does absolutely nothing for us now as flawed humans trying to adjudicate the actions of other flawed humans. But I'm digressing...
By all accounts — literally all — Brett Kavanaugh’s moral bank account is way in the black. He has led a life of decency, integrity, commitment to family, and commitment to community that few Americans can match. On these grounds alone, the charges against him as a teenager should be ignored.
Ignored? No. Ultimately dismissed? Maybe. We need to know, as best we can, exactly what happened, and we need to know if he's being truthful about it. Again, that's the whole point of an investigation and hearings and further inquiry.
Also, it's worth noting, being a Supreme Court judge is not only a morality competition. If Kavanaugh is knowingly lying about the charges against him that would disqualify him from the court in my view, even if he's such an upstanding citizen, he's still morally in the black by Prager's reckoning.
So why is this charge taken seriously?
Because charges of sexual assault should be taken seriously, even if the accused are teenagers. At 17, you are not legally an adult, but you're not a little kid either. You're in between, which makes cases like this very sticky. And I'm not the first one to point out that when it comes to a poor black teenager accused of committing a crime, conservatives rarely have issue with him being treated and tried as an adult, and yet when it's a privileged white kid, suddenly it's a different standard. (And sometimes they aren't even kids -- George W. Bush tried to slough off bad things he was doing in his mid-30s as youthful indiscretions, and don't even get me started on Don Jr.)
One reason is, as I recently wrote, the greatest fear in America is fear of the Left — the fear of what the Left will do to you if you cross it. Not fear of God. Not fear of doing wrong. Fear of the Left. Offend the Left and you will lose your reputation and, quite often, your job or your business.
One reason conservatives hate "victimhood culture" so much is because they want nothing more than to be the victims themselves. They love pointing out how persecuted they are. The big bad Left coming to get you! I mean, sure, the Right (to use the counterpart of Prager's term) holds all three branches of the federal government and the majority of state governments and governorships, but it's actually the Left who holds all the real power. They should be feared. I mean, just look at all the great men they've destroyed: All Harvey Weinstein has is the millions of dollars he made while sexually assaulting his underlings, same with Matt Lauer. Louis CK had to leave the comedy scene for almost a whole year, and look at how mean everybody is to Donald Trump -- he almost didn't get to be president!
As a middle-age, upper-middle class white man, I know exactly what Prager is talking about. I mean, yeah, sure, we've controlled the entire country since it's inception over 200 years ago, and we don't have to worry about things like, say, a police officer mistaking us for a burglar in our own home and killing us. But if we grope just one woman or defend somebody who does, we will absolutely get destroyed on Twitter.
Oh, by the way, Christine Blasey Ford is receiving death threats and is too scared to live at home right now. She's probably just afraid the Left is going to take her reputation.
Another reason is pure, amoral, demagogic politics. No honest American of any political persuasion believes that if a woman were to charge a Democrat-appointed judge such as Merrick Garland with doing to her 36 years ago in high school what Brett Kavanaugh is charged with having done 36 years ago in high school, the Democratic party and the media would be demanding that the confirmation vote be delayed or that the candidate withdraw.
This is flat-out wrong. Did Prager not follow the Al Franken story? The Left, with dwindling few exceptions, doesn't like sexual assault because it's wrong, and it sucks for women. The end. It doesn't matter who carries it out.
One of the Right's staple moves is to project their own failings onto the other side. Their party is now run by a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women (and who admitted it on tape), and they supported an alleged child molester for Congress. They have no honest defense for this, so they either shamelessly deny it (despite the evidence), or they do what Prager is doing and play the "both sides" game. But there is no both sides in this one. It's not equal. The Right supports sexual assaulters (perhaps begrudgingly, but they support them nonetheless); the Left doesn't. Period.
A third reason is feminism’s weakening of the American female (and male, but that is another story). A generation ago, a drunk teenager at a party groping a teenage girl over her clothing while trying to remove as much of her clothing as possible would not have been defended or countenanced. But it would not have been deemed as inducing post-traumatic stress disorder either.
Hey, if anybody knows about the weakening of the American female, it's a 75-year-old man, right? I mean, I could either trust his views on the subject or those of every woman I've ever talked to.
As for the rest of the paragraph, Prager is right: A generation ago we did not treat sexual assault allegations with the gravity they deserved. Is this supposed to be in support of his thesis?
This weakening of the female is perfectly illustrated by the statement released by Susanna Jones, head of Holton-Arms School, the private preparatory school for girls in Bethesda, Md., that the accuser attended. “As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers,” Jones said.
“Empowers women”? Please.
Speaking out against sexual assaulters knowing full well an avalanche of shit from people like Dennis Prager is coming your way is indeed empowering.
Nearly every woman past puberty has experienced a man trying to grope her. (This is, needless to say, wrong.) My mother was groped by a physician. She told my father about it. My father told the physician that if he were to do it again, he would break his hands. And it remained a family folk tale. If you had told my mother she was a “survivor,” she would have wondered what you were talking about. The term was reserved for people who survived Nazi concentration camps and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and for cancer survivors, not women groped by a man.
That's what his father did? That's the appropriate solution? Why didn't he report this man? Did he still have a job? Did his mom still see him? How many other women was he assaulting? Couldn't his dad have prevented a lot of groping (which, needless to say, is wrong) by saying something more public?
Also, his point about the term "survivor" is totally irrelevant. It's what I call terminology trolling (which is some terminology I just made up on the spot -- what do you think?).
When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.
This -- and I say this without exaggeration -- is the most embarrassing paragraph of an opinion essay I've ever read. If my name was attached to something this terrible, I would destroy my computer and then I would destroy my wife's computer and then I would go door to door, city to city, country to country, in an attempt to destroy the entire Internet one computer at a time. I wouldn't succeed, but I would try (and even if I did somehow manage to do it, I have enough credit in my moral bank account that nobody could hold it against me).
Think about what Prager is saying: The way to handle sexual assaulters in the workplace is to tell them to "buzz off" (which I'm sure hurt this man's feelings immensely) and then do... nothing. You shouldn't report them. You shouldn't call them out. You shouldn't hold them accountable in any way. In fact, it's on you to change your work life so that you don't get harassed anymore. Avoiding your boss so that he doesn't sexually assault you: That's not empowerment. That's acquiescence.
And it's an acquiescence that too many women have had to do for too many years. And it needs to end.
This betrays the mindset of people like Dennis Prager: They just don't think sexual assault is that bad. That's the bottom line. They might not like it. They probably don't treat women that way themselves and wish other men wouldn't as well. But ultimately it's just not something that we as a society should make that big a deal of. Boys will be boys, and girls just need to deal with it. It's nothing deeper than that.
In sum, I am not interested in whether Mrs. Ford, an anti-Trump activist, is telling the truth. Because even if true, what happened to her was clearly wrong, but it tells us nothing about Brett Kavanaugh since the age of 17. But for the record, I don’t believe her story. Aside from too many missing details — most women remember virtually everything about the circumstances of a sexual assault no matter how long ago — few men do what she charges Kavanaugh with having done only one time. And no other woman has ever charged him with any sexual misconduct.
Maybe Mrs. Ford is an anti-Trump activist because she's anti-sexual assault. That would make a lot of sense, actually. As for the rest of his account, well, it's also true that women rarely manifest fake accusations, and when they do, they are rarely as lacking in lurid detail as Mrs. Ford's. So, there's that.
Do not be surprised if a future Republican candidate for office or judicial nominee — no matter how exemplary a life he has led — is accused of sexual misconduct . . . from when he was in elementary school.
Hahahaha... It's funny to think of an elementary school kid committing sexual misconduct, isn't it? But, seriously, I won't be surprised if a future Repulican is accused of sexual misconduct, and I also won't be surprised when other Republicans support him nevertheless.
-----------------------------------------
The Charges against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored
It is almost impossible to overstate the damage done to America’s moral compass by taking the charges leveled against Judge Brett Kavanaugh seriously.
It undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society.
Taking charges of sexual assault seriously undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society? I would say committing acts of sexual misconduct does more to undermine such principles, but so far at least we are very much on brand for a conservative like Prager -- being an accuser is often considered worse than doing the misdeeds one is accused of.
Those who claim that the charges against Judge Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford are important and worth investigating and that they ultimately, if believed, invalidate his candidacy for the U.S. Supreme Court are stating that:
Before he gets to his points, notice he's already packaging two separate issues together: 1) Whether or not the charges against Kavanaugh are worthy of investigation; 2) Whether or not they are invalidating if believed. It's a perfectly consistent position to say they should be investigated, and then ultimately decide they are not invalidating. In fact, the very purpose of an investigation would be to determine this.
a) What a middle-age adult did in high school is all we need to need to know to evaluate an individual’s character — even when his entire adult life has been impeccable.
Literally nobody is saying this.
b) No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager.
See above.
No decent — or rational — society has ever believed such nihilistic nonsense.
Yes, and neither does anybody else except Prager's straw man. My last post expressly addresses the quandary of handling accusations against adults from their teenage years, and if you want to hear somebody more professional and more prominent than me talk about it, listen to Slate's episodes of Political Gabfest on Kavanaugh. Emily Bazelon, certainly no fan of Kavanaugh's jurisprudence, states explicitly how uncomfortable she is with holding adults accountable for things they did as children.
This is another example of the moral chaos sown by secularism and the Left. In any society rooted in Judeo-Christian values, it is understood that people should be morally assessed based on how they behave over the course of their lifetime — early behavior being the least important period in making such an assessment.
If you want to get into a debate about Judeo-Christian values versus secularism when it comes to sex, I'm all for it. Because I can't think of anything that has a worse track record on anything else in the history of humankind than religion does on sex.
These religious values taught us that all of us are sinners and, therefore, with the exception of those who have engaged in true evil, we need to be very careful in making moral evaluations of human beings.
"True evil" is such a catch-all cop-out (what is it? and who gets to decide?), but okay I agree with the larger point about being careful in making moral evaluations.
And, of course, we were taught to extend forgiveness when people demonstrate through their actions that they have changed. As a well-known ancient Jewish adage put it: “Where the penitent stands, the most righteous cannot stand.” In other words, the highest moral achievement is moral improvement.
This is subtly one of the weakest arguments Prager proffers (and that's saying something), because, although I'm not religious, I know that key pieces of many religions, including Judaism and Christianity, are atonement and repentance. Kavanaugh has neither atoned nor repented for his "sins." On the contrary, he's categorical denied them, in effect saying his accuser is either lying or mistaken (as if it's impossible that the guy who used to drink to excess and has already shown his "flexibility" when it comes to truth and who doesn't want an investigation by a neutral party could be the mistaken/dishonest one).
As I mentioned in my previous post, if Kavanaugh had responded differently to the charges -- if he had said that he doesn't remember everything he did as a drunk, dumb kid, and that he was sorry if he caused any pain, then things would be very different, but he didn't say that. He makes no acknowledgement of any mistakes on his part at all. Until he does (which he won't), getting into all this "where the penitent stand" stuff seems moot to me.
Perhaps the most important principle violated by taking this 36-year-old high school-era charge seriously is the principle of the moral bank account.
Every one of us has a moral bank account. Our good deeds are deposits, and our bad deeds are withdrawals. We therefore assess a person the same way we assess our bank account. If our good actions outweigh our bad actions, we are morally in the black; if our bad actions greatly outweigh our good actions, we are morally in the red.
This is not how society works. This is not how morality works. We don't allow people to commit crimes and behave immorally because they have enough credit in their moral bank accounts to make up for it. (It's like a riff on that Simpsons clip: I'd like to remind the court how many good things I've done in my life. I should be able to run over as many kids as I want!) This is such a simplistic way to view morality, and more problematically, it's a total useless and impractical one, because there is nobody qualified to evaluate our moral currency and run our accounts. There are no moral bankers. How much does a grope cost? How much does a lewd comment cost? How much credit do you get for not harassing somebody? And what do you get for doing something good for one person that's simultaneously bad for somebody else?
But this is how Prager thinks. I've heard him talk about why he's religious, and one of his reasons is that without God there is no "objective" moral truth. He's very bothered by the relativism of human morality. And, by the way, so am I! It's scary and weird to think that there is nothing out there to keep us in line -- that there is no ultimate justice -- that we are all we have. But my answer isn't to make a bunch of shit up and pretend as if there is. And even if Prager is right about a real God holding an objective moral truth, it does absolutely nothing for us now as flawed humans trying to adjudicate the actions of other flawed humans. But I'm digressing...
By all accounts — literally all — Brett Kavanaugh’s moral bank account is way in the black. He has led a life of decency, integrity, commitment to family, and commitment to community that few Americans can match. On these grounds alone, the charges against him as a teenager should be ignored.
Ignored? No. Ultimately dismissed? Maybe. We need to know, as best we can, exactly what happened, and we need to know if he's being truthful about it. Again, that's the whole point of an investigation and hearings and further inquiry.
Also, it's worth noting, being a Supreme Court judge is not only a morality competition. If Kavanaugh is knowingly lying about the charges against him that would disqualify him from the court in my view, even if he's such an upstanding citizen, he's still morally in the black by Prager's reckoning.
So why is this charge taken seriously?
Because charges of sexual assault should be taken seriously, even if the accused are teenagers. At 17, you are not legally an adult, but you're not a little kid either. You're in between, which makes cases like this very sticky. And I'm not the first one to point out that when it comes to a poor black teenager accused of committing a crime, conservatives rarely have issue with him being treated and tried as an adult, and yet when it's a privileged white kid, suddenly it's a different standard. (And sometimes they aren't even kids -- George W. Bush tried to slough off bad things he was doing in his mid-30s as youthful indiscretions, and don't even get me started on Don Jr.)
One reason is, as I recently wrote, the greatest fear in America is fear of the Left — the fear of what the Left will do to you if you cross it. Not fear of God. Not fear of doing wrong. Fear of the Left. Offend the Left and you will lose your reputation and, quite often, your job or your business.
One reason conservatives hate "victimhood culture" so much is because they want nothing more than to be the victims themselves. They love pointing out how persecuted they are. The big bad Left coming to get you! I mean, sure, the Right (to use the counterpart of Prager's term) holds all three branches of the federal government and the majority of state governments and governorships, but it's actually the Left who holds all the real power. They should be feared. I mean, just look at all the great men they've destroyed: All Harvey Weinstein has is the millions of dollars he made while sexually assaulting his underlings, same with Matt Lauer. Louis CK had to leave the comedy scene for almost a whole year, and look at how mean everybody is to Donald Trump -- he almost didn't get to be president!
As a middle-age, upper-middle class white man, I know exactly what Prager is talking about. I mean, yeah, sure, we've controlled the entire country since it's inception over 200 years ago, and we don't have to worry about things like, say, a police officer mistaking us for a burglar in our own home and killing us. But if we grope just one woman or defend somebody who does, we will absolutely get destroyed on Twitter.
Oh, by the way, Christine Blasey Ford is receiving death threats and is too scared to live at home right now. She's probably just afraid the Left is going to take her reputation.
Another reason is pure, amoral, demagogic politics. No honest American of any political persuasion believes that if a woman were to charge a Democrat-appointed judge such as Merrick Garland with doing to her 36 years ago in high school what Brett Kavanaugh is charged with having done 36 years ago in high school, the Democratic party and the media would be demanding that the confirmation vote be delayed or that the candidate withdraw.
This is flat-out wrong. Did Prager not follow the Al Franken story? The Left, with dwindling few exceptions, doesn't like sexual assault because it's wrong, and it sucks for women. The end. It doesn't matter who carries it out.
One of the Right's staple moves is to project their own failings onto the other side. Their party is now run by a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women (and who admitted it on tape), and they supported an alleged child molester for Congress. They have no honest defense for this, so they either shamelessly deny it (despite the evidence), or they do what Prager is doing and play the "both sides" game. But there is no both sides in this one. It's not equal. The Right supports sexual assaulters (perhaps begrudgingly, but they support them nonetheless); the Left doesn't. Period.
A third reason is feminism’s weakening of the American female (and male, but that is another story). A generation ago, a drunk teenager at a party groping a teenage girl over her clothing while trying to remove as much of her clothing as possible would not have been defended or countenanced. But it would not have been deemed as inducing post-traumatic stress disorder either.
Hey, if anybody knows about the weakening of the American female, it's a 75-year-old man, right? I mean, I could either trust his views on the subject or those of every woman I've ever talked to.
As for the rest of the paragraph, Prager is right: A generation ago we did not treat sexual assault allegations with the gravity they deserved. Is this supposed to be in support of his thesis?
This weakening of the female is perfectly illustrated by the statement released by Susanna Jones, head of Holton-Arms School, the private preparatory school for girls in Bethesda, Md., that the accuser attended. “As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers,” Jones said.
“Empowers women”? Please.
Speaking out against sexual assaulters knowing full well an avalanche of shit from people like Dennis Prager is coming your way is indeed empowering.
Nearly every woman past puberty has experienced a man trying to grope her. (This is, needless to say, wrong.) My mother was groped by a physician. She told my father about it. My father told the physician that if he were to do it again, he would break his hands. And it remained a family folk tale. If you had told my mother she was a “survivor,” she would have wondered what you were talking about. The term was reserved for people who survived Nazi concentration camps and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and for cancer survivors, not women groped by a man.
That's what his father did? That's the appropriate solution? Why didn't he report this man? Did he still have a job? Did his mom still see him? How many other women was he assaulting? Couldn't his dad have prevented a lot of groping (which, needless to say, is wrong) by saying something more public?
Also, his point about the term "survivor" is totally irrelevant. It's what I call terminology trolling (which is some terminology I just made up on the spot -- what do you think?).
When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.
This -- and I say this without exaggeration -- is the most embarrassing paragraph of an opinion essay I've ever read. If my name was attached to something this terrible, I would destroy my computer and then I would destroy my wife's computer and then I would go door to door, city to city, country to country, in an attempt to destroy the entire Internet one computer at a time. I wouldn't succeed, but I would try (and even if I did somehow manage to do it, I have enough credit in my moral bank account that nobody could hold it against me).
Think about what Prager is saying: The way to handle sexual assaulters in the workplace is to tell them to "buzz off" (which I'm sure hurt this man's feelings immensely) and then do... nothing. You shouldn't report them. You shouldn't call them out. You shouldn't hold them accountable in any way. In fact, it's on you to change your work life so that you don't get harassed anymore. Avoiding your boss so that he doesn't sexually assault you: That's not empowerment. That's acquiescence.
And it's an acquiescence that too many women have had to do for too many years. And it needs to end.
This betrays the mindset of people like Dennis Prager: They just don't think sexual assault is that bad. That's the bottom line. They might not like it. They probably don't treat women that way themselves and wish other men wouldn't as well. But ultimately it's just not something that we as a society should make that big a deal of. Boys will be boys, and girls just need to deal with it. It's nothing deeper than that.
In sum, I am not interested in whether Mrs. Ford, an anti-Trump activist, is telling the truth. Because even if true, what happened to her was clearly wrong, but it tells us nothing about Brett Kavanaugh since the age of 17. But for the record, I don’t believe her story. Aside from too many missing details — most women remember virtually everything about the circumstances of a sexual assault no matter how long ago — few men do what she charges Kavanaugh with having done only one time. And no other woman has ever charged him with any sexual misconduct.
Maybe Mrs. Ford is an anti-Trump activist because she's anti-sexual assault. That would make a lot of sense, actually. As for the rest of his account, well, it's also true that women rarely manifest fake accusations, and when they do, they are rarely as lacking in lurid detail as Mrs. Ford's. So, there's that.
Do not be surprised if a future Republican candidate for office or judicial nominee — no matter how exemplary a life he has led — is accused of sexual misconduct . . . from when he was in elementary school.
Hahahaha... It's funny to think of an elementary school kid committing sexual misconduct, isn't it? But, seriously, I won't be surprised if a future Repulican is accused of sexual misconduct, and I also won't be surprised when other Republicans support him nevertheless.
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